'Brendan and the Secret of Kells' Animation Film at Annecy '08

As the world's most prominent animation marketplace gets underway this week in France, a vast array of producers, distributors and potential buyers are lining up to discern what the next few years hold for the moving pictures industries. The 2008 Annecy International Animated Film Festival has always found a way to exhibit both the highly noted as well as the "works in progress" that could prove groundbreaking to a variety of viewing territories. Sporting any number of business meetings or short and feature film screenings, Annecy is certainly a "kaleidoscope of international animation," as its organizers assert.

Annecy 2008 again aims to provide industry players with a view to new, intriguing, curious hyped and juried cartoons created for many a distribution network. With a panel focus on the bourgeoning Indian market, a tribute to Tex Avery, several conferences for discussion, a film on Winsor McCay, and much more, the 2008 Annecy International Animated Film Festival (June 09th - June 14th) is in full swing.

There are countless titles worth catching at the France festival, but amongst the deluge of character designs, backgrounds, preview clips, and the speaker commentary that invariably accompany them, many are drawn to the anticipated preview of the animated feature film Brendan and the Secret of Kells.

An international co-production initiated by the young and talented staff of Cartoon Saloon (Ireland), this particular movie also features executive input from Les Armateurs (France) and Vivifilm (Belgium).

The 9th Century tale of a young boy whose destiny is to complete the legendary Book of Kells, the Cartoon Saloon film Brendan and the Secret of Kells looks to be a marvelous display of creativity in animation, both in terms of compelling visuals and articulate storytelling.

Associates in animation production with the three before-mentioned studios are Walking the Dog (Belgium), Digital Graphics (Belgium), Spirit (France), Kecskemet Animation Film Studio (Hungary) and Lightstar Studios (Brazil).

Brendan and the Secret of Kells follows a twelve-year-old boy named Brendan, who is currently living quietly with the monks in the fortified Kells Abbey, under the tutelage of his uncle Abbott Cellach. Although the looming danger of invasion by the dark and terrifying Vikings remain a constant threat, it is no mystery that Brendan is being groomed as a future replacement for the Abbott Cellach, a stern and mechanical man. But it is in this remote part of Ireland that Brendan soon discovers something much more than the copasetic tedium of monk-hood when he comes into contact with Brother Aidan, a master illuminator.

The story of the animated film continues as Brother Aiden shows Brendan his current project, which is the extraordinarily brilliant and insatiably creative, but still very unfinished book of illumination. Brendan and the Secret of Kells finds a young man whose destiny to finish this remarkable book, and finds a young man whose new talent for the art of illumination similarly makes clearer both the boy's most anxious desire for enlightenment as well as his most deep and darkest fears.

Brendan must finish the book, but it isn't before he ventures beyond the walls of Kells Abbey and confronts the mythical world outside, filled with vile, dangerous creatures and marvelously enchanted beings alike. Will a chance meeting with a mysterious young forest spirit, a pale girl named Aisling, curb his chances of encountering a worrisome demise in the wild? Or will the Viking hordes close in sooner than the young artist is able to awaken his inner prodigy for the art of illumination?